THINKING OUT LOUD

Sometimes I think about things past and present and there are times when I'd like to share my thoughts and as I can't always burden himself with what I'm thinking I thought I would burden you with them instead!!!  How self-indulgent of me to think anyone would be interested but here goes anyway.

While lying in bed this morning (I was being self-indulgent there too as this damned cold thingie won't leave me) I was listening to the truck picking up the wheelie bins and taking our rubbish away.  It was then I began to think back to when I was a child when we had just the one quite tiny metal bin, with lid, that used to sit out of the way in our back garden.  In those days the 'garbo' used to leave his truck, walk down our side path with his own bin on his shoulder and tip our rubbish into his bin and then deposit said rubbish in his truck.

In later years we had to take our rubbish bins out (by then I think they were solid plastic bins and possibly a little larger than the metal bins, and put them, I think, by the front gate/fence so the man didn't have to spend so much time walking into people's back gardens to collect the rubbish.  That probably saved problems with dogs and leaving gates open etc., and I feel the unions may have also had a hand in that decision. The other thing that crossed my mind when thinking about all that and those quite small bins was the fact that they were seldom full!

These days we have two bins....one for the recyclable rubbish (or at least they try and tell us they recycle all that stuff) and the other (in our area) for anything that can be composted.  I believe some areas actually have three different bins.  We have a list of what can go in that green bin and I can't help laughing when I read it because I'd never think of putting toothbrushes or toothpaste tubes in our own compost at home, plus several other items I can't help wondering about.  If you have doubts about what goes into which bin you can ring and ask those that supposedly know but even they don't know all the answers so it is no wonder we householders are at times quite bewildered by all this modern thinking.  The yellow topped bin is easy....you put everything in there that doesn't go into the green bin. : )

All the above led me to two separate thoughts, which were:

1.  How come two people (such as us) can these days produce so much rubbish whereas many years ago households could comfortably fit their weekly rubbish into one quite small bin, and

2.  How much worse off are the breweries because of the modernisation of garbage collection methods?  My parents didn't do it and I'm not sure whether we did it either but many, many people always used to leave out a couple of bottles of beer for the garbo every Christmas week.  Once mechanisation took over the men no longer got out of their trucks so consequently....no beer.  Even if only every third household in every street left out two bottles of beer at Christmas, how many bottles of beer would that amount to throughout the whole country?  I won't even try to do those maths but it gave me food for thought re the breweries.   Did they suddenly recognise a dramatic drop in sales?  What do you think?